KDE

After a lengthy public spat with Canonical and the Ubuntu Community Council, Kubuntu founder Jonathan Riddell stepped down as release manager for that "flavor" of Ubuntu. He’s now back with a new project named KDE Neon, which provides stable Ubuntu systems with the latest KDE software.

Google Code In is our annual project to give tasks to school pupils to contribute to KDE projects. One task this year is to write a Dot article and top Code In student Stanford L has interviewed WikiToLearn contributor and Sysadmin Luca Toma.

Ex-Kubuntu maintainer Jonathan Riddell had the great pleasure of announcing yesterday, January 30, during the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) 2016 event, the KDE Neon project.

I have the pleasure to announce the releases of two new KDevelop versions:

On one hand, there is the new and shiny KDevelop 5.0 Beta 2 release, which brings us much closer to a final release. Tons of issues have been resolved, many features got polished, and even our UI cleaned up a bit here and there. And did I mention impoved OS X and Windows support? See here for more:

https://www.kdevelop.org/news/kdevelop-50-beta2-release

Besides this new beta release, which is where most of our effort went into, I am also happy to announce KDevelop 4.7.3, a new bugfix release of our latest stable KDE 4 based KDevelop. Several annoying problems are resolved now, see the announcement for more information:

digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 5.0.0 beta3. This version is new stage to the long way to stabilize code of Qt5 port of next main digiKam release. See previous announcement about 5.0.0-beta2 release to know all details about code re-writing under progress.

In the last two weeks, I worked on adding minimaps, enabling the different layouts for long routes and shorter routes and the refactoring of code. After discussion with design team, it was confirmed that minimaps were to be added for starting and finishing points only.

But what is chroma subsampling and what does it do? As you may know, JPEG is a lossy format, which means that it trades quality for a smaller size. One of the methods for achieving a smaller size is to store color information (chroma) at a lower resolution than brightness (a.k.a intensity or luma) data. This is possible due to the fact that the human eye is less sensitive to color than brightness, so discarding color information doesn’t produce a perceptible loss of quality.

Today I made my first talk in a big event, I talked about Qt and C++, and on this talk a 100 people show up, but only 6 people on that group knew about Qt. I remembered when I started to study Qt, and it’s really hard to find Qt programmers on Brazil, until I met the people from KDE Brazil. So my talk was about how to create user interfaces with Qt. What modules we should use to make an app. If is better use QtWidgets or QtQuick. And I think that I made a impression. =D

Qt 5.6 brings improved high-DPI support, in the form of better support for the devicePixelRatio scaling mode. In this blog we’ll look at how to configure and enable it, from the perspective of a Qt application user and a Qt application developer.

There are still some things that needs fixing. The current installer is built from git master and not from released packages so the translation stuff hat you usually get with the release packages are missing. So only partially translated. Another feature that I’m still missing is the spell-check. I need to still add a/hspell and language dictionaries to get that to work.

The Qt 5.7 release is running slightly behind schedule due to the recent licensing changes with open-sourcing some new components and other reasons, but upstream Qt developers are now planning for the feature freeze to happen next week.

Now that Builder has integrated Template-GLib, I started working on creating projects from templates. Today, this is only supported from the command line. Obviously the goal is to have it in the UI side-by-side with other project creation methods.

The new Community Edition of Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric is aimed at accelerating the adoption of Big Switch's SDN offerings.

Big Switch Networks officials are looking to accelerate the adoption of the company's software-defined network products by offering free versions of its software products.

The company on Jan. 26 introduced the Community Edition of its Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric software offerings that officials said will give businesses a taste of what Big Switch's products can do and hopefully enticement them to buy the more robust commercial versions.

Opera Software, through Aneta Reluga, today announced the release of yet another developer build for the upcoming Opera 36.0 web browser for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

More in Tux Machines

RIP Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.

The open source, Linux based “AsteroidOS” alternative to Wear OS arrives in a stable 1.0 release, and Block spins off some of its Android smartwatch stack as an open source OpenWatch Project.
The AsteroidOS project has released version 1.0 of its open source, Linux-based smartwatch distribution. Designed for after-market installation on “Wear OS by Google” (formerly Android Wear) watches, AsteroidOS can now be dual booted on seven different models. The release follows the late March announcement of an OpenWatch Project for building Android based open source custom ROMs on Wear OS watches.

Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year.
Their deadline for ordering a developer kit is the end of the month and the kit price has raised to $399 USD. In the process, Purism believes they are still on track for their January 2019 for coming up with having the phone's actual hardware ready.

Red Hat News

Today, Pure Storage is excited to announce Pure Service Orchestrator. It is now possible to deliver container storage-as-a-service to empower your developers to build and deploy scale-out, microservices applications. The agility that your developers expect they could only get from the public cloud is now possible, on premise!
In this blog, we’ll discuss why the adoption of containers is exploding, how the the lack of persistent storage threatens to slow adoption, and why a newer, smarter approach to storage delivery for containerized application environments is needed.

With a Red Hat subscription, you get the latest enterprise-ready software, expert knowledge, product security and technical support from trusted engineers making software the open source way. Red Hat Support makes sure our enterprise technology works in your environment, and helps you minimize the impact to your business if an issue occurs. If you need to open a support case, it will be routed to engineers that are specialized in the product that you use, so your issue can be efficiently resolved by experts.

Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud, an integrated solution for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments. The new offering combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 in a single user experience, supported by a common lifecycle for greater operational and organizational efficiency.

The firm recently celebrated 25 years in business, and according to Miles, Red Hat is as strong as ever. Four years into his tenure at the company here in the Middle East, he has been “pleasantly surprised” and “very impressed” that regional organisations are already pursuing strong strategies in open source.

Red Hat launched a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform for telcos and enterprises that combines OpenStack compute with its Ceph storage.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud is an open, integrated platform for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments.
Announced Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit, the new platform blends Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 into a single user experience for hyperconvergence in the hybrid cloud. Red Hat said it was the biggest contributor to both open source projects.

Debian and Derivatives

More demos of vnlog and feedgnuplot usage! This is pretty pointless, but should be a decent demo of the tools at least. This is a demo, not documentation; so for usage details consult the normal docs.
Each Wednesday night I join a group bike ride. This is an organized affair, and each week an email precedes the ride, very roughly describing the route. The two organizers alternate leading the ride each week, and consequently the emails alternate also. I was getting the feeling that some of the announcements show up in my mailbxo more punctually than others, and after a recent 20-minutes-before-the ride email, I decided this just had to be quantified.
The emails all go to a google-group email. The google-groups people are a wheel-reinventing bunch, so talking to the archive can't be done with normal tools (NNTP? mbox files? No?). A brief search revealed somebody's home-grown tool to programmatically grab the archive:

To whom it may concern, this is my report over the first few weeks of gsoc under the umbrella of the Debian project. I’m writing this on my way back from the minidebconf in Hamburg, which was a nice experience, maybe there will be another post about that ;)
So, the goal of my GSOC project is to design and implement a new SSO solution for Debian. But that only touches one part of the projects deliveries. As you can read in the description Alexander Wirth originally posted in the Debian Wiki, the project consists of two parts, where the first one is the design and coding of a new backend and self-service interface for Debian guest users (this includes the accounts of Debian Maintainers).

Compared to its previous releases, Debian-based Parrot 4.0 ethical hacking distro has arrived with a lot more changes. The development team has called it an important milestone in the history of the project.